Bridging the "Gap"

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) is one
of the most significant philosophers in Modern philosophy. This is because of many reasons far too broad
for an article of this scope to examine.
We can, however, examine one of his major contributions to modern philosophy:
Constructivism, which has been, recognized by many, as a Copernican Revolution in
epistemology. Though a full examination
of Kant’s Constructivism is also too ambitious for our discussion, we can,
perhaps, give a sufficient enough overview of it to introduce it to those relatively
unfamiliar with the history of philosophy, yet informed enough of the issues
Descartes discussed to have a desire to understand how they shaped the course
of philosophy to follow in ways he could have never predicted.

To understand the
significance of Kant’s Copernican revolution in epistemology, we must first situate
his thoughts into the appropriate discourse.
The immediate discourse of his revolutionary ideas in epistemology is
his direct response to the skepticism of the philosopher David Hume (1711 –
1776). The larger discourse is the shape
of modern philosophy[1] as
a whole. The whole referred to here is necessary
because Kant is not merely responding to the entire history of modern philosophy, that particular discourse which began
with Rene Descartes, but also revolutionizes the future of modern philosophy, in a shift from ontology to
epistemology.

[1]For the
purposes of this article, we will stipulate modern philosophy to mean those particular
lines of epistemology and metaphysics that result from and employ the technique
of Rene Descartes Meditations on First
Philosophy. Specifically, his
skeptical approach, systematic doubt, and the issue of the “gap” between mind
and body his work led to.

Immanuel Kant | Source

David Hume | Source

The larger discourse in which Kant
took part began not with Descartes’ conclusions or insights, but rather it was
his method and a consequence of it that defined what would become modern philosophy. When Rene Descartes sought to investigate all
of his beliefs to see if there was anything certain in them, he also
established a method for doing this: systematic doubt, a philosophical method
of inquiry concerning beliefs that asks of each: is there any possible way to
doubt its validity? If any doubt can be
found, no matter how improbable or unlikely, the belief must be discarded as if
completely false. What Descartes hoped
to accomplish with this method was the foundation of a basic truth that could
not be refuted and from which a system of irrefutable beliefs might be
assembled.

Instead,
what Descartes did was create the ultimate skeptical argument. His system of systematic doubt, though
intended to provide certainty, ultimately created problems that would dictate
the course of modern philosophy that is until Immanuel Kant.[1] Though Descartes did achieve his immediate
goal, an unshakeable truth,[2] it
was his creation of the scenario of the evil demon that defeated any
possibility of provable belief systems.
This “evil demon hypothesis” will henceforth be referred to as “the
matrix,” after the popular film, the matrix is essentially a motivated evil
demon that the reader is most likely already familiar with. To update Descartes “Evil Demon” approach to
skepticism, ask yourself the question, and really think about it, how do you
know you are not in the matrix right now?
Understanding how life in the matrix has every appearance of life
outside of the matrix, the crucial problem of modern philosophy until Kant,
becomes apparent. Yes, the great
thinkers of the last 300 years have debated ways to prove the matrix didn’t
exist long before the movie came out. The
philosophical discussion between these great minds has typically referred to
this problem as the mind/body problem with good reason.

I
cover the “gap” between body and mind more thoroughly elsewhere, but we should refresh
for those who have not read that article.
To outline the problem, Descartes explained the difference between the
mind and the body as the difference between two types of “substances.” These two types of substances were, exactly,
thought and extension. This seems fairly
simple prima facie, but it is
anything but as the resulting philosophical discourse shows. To elaborate upon the problem as Descartes
described it, the mind is made of a substance called “thought,” while the body
is made up of a substance called “extension.”
In non philosophical terms, the problem is best understood by asking the
question, how would it be possible for anyone “inside” the matrix to know they
were “inside” of the matrix without actually going “outside” the matrix? If you
consider this point for a while, it is a dilemma.

[2] This is
Descartes famous Cogito, “Every Time I think I exist, that thought is
necessarily true.” The significance of
this is that our existence cannot be doubted, though all manner of our
existence can. Even so, we are a thing
which experiences (even if we have no reason to believe the content of those
experiences). This is a quick and dirty
explanation of years of philosophical discourse between Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibniz, Locke, Berkley
and Hume. The significance of the Cogito
will resurface with Kant, because it is the only thing from the previous
discourse of modern philosophy he keeps in his revolutionary take on it.

Books by Immanuel Kant

Books By David Hume

Philosophically
speaking, to be clear, the question is exactly: how is it possible for two
separate types of substances to communicate when there is nothing in the one
that is contained in the other and vice versa.
The answer, despite Descartes claim that it was possible, was apparent
to Spinoza and Leibniz who took up this issue directly after Descartes: these
two substances had no way of communicating.
Despite the implications for reality, the immediate philosophical response
to Descartes “gap” problem was that bridging it was an impossibility. Thus, Descartes’ system of systematic doubt
led to the creation of a gap between what happens in our minds and what takes
place out in the “real world.” This
would have more implications that it might seem at first, and, if you are a
careful thinker, I am sure you can see the influence of this divide in ideas
you’ve encountered in all sorts of arenas and schools of thought.

In
many different ways, the question of bridging this gap was taken up by many of
the most important philosophers who followed Descartes, but, however, there was
no consensus between these minds on how to resolve the issue. While some argued a problematic unity of
substance, still others tried to improve upon this “one substance”[1]
explanation. In fact, it was not until
David Hume came along, following on the idealism of George Berkley (1685 –
1753), that modern philosophy quit trying to resolve this idea of a “gap”
between our mental perceptions and “the real world” of what happens outside of
our thoughts (or the matrix). Hume,
reviewing the discourse of modern philosophy before him, stated what seemed the
common sense answer: this discussion is digressing into
meaningless fodder, the logical consequence we are all skirting around acknowledging
is that there is no way to bridge this gap and know for certain that we do not
live in a world like the matrix.[2]
Skepticism was the answer David Hume provided for the problems that had dictated
the course of modern philosophy before him.

[1] Spinoza
proposed that there was one substance, which was God, and that thought and
extension were merely attributes of that substance of God. Leibniz, like Spinoza, wished to reconcile
this “gap” between the mind and body, but was not satisfied with Spinoza’s
pantheistic monoism, and created an even more complex system of monadology of
which an exploration of which can yield no insightful purpose to this article
it is so dense and no longer considered relevant.

[2] One need
only spend a brief amount of time with the ontological discussions of the previous
mentioned philosophers to find David Hume’s take refreshing, logical, and, to
put it simply, saner than the hundred
years of philosophy before him. Yes,
Hume is a skeptic and doubted everything, but he is vastly, as is his skepticism,
misunderstood. If we were all more like
David Hume, no one would be killing anyone over what a book told them God
thinks about people who don’t read that book.

Baruch Spinoza | Source

George Berkeley | Source

How Kant Fits In

This brings us back to where we
started. To understand Kant’s immediate
context, an understanding of Hume’s specific reasoning towards his skeptical
conclusion about the existence of the outside world must be undertaken.[1] From his position, Hume was able to review
all the arguments that came before him and conclude that systematic doubt,
“therefore, were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it
plainly is not) would be entirely incurable and no reasoning could ever bring
us to a state of assurance and conviction upon any subject.”[2] Hume then reviews the next steps made by
Descartes and Spinoza: the appeal to a supreme being who would guarantee that
our perceptions do indeed match up with an “external” or “real world.” Hume rejects this because, once one accepts
the tenants of systematic doubt one must disqualify any evidence from the
“external” to justify one’s belief in a supreme being and then as Hume put it, “we
shall be at a loss to find arguments by which we may prove the existence of
that Being or any of his attributes.”[3]

Hume’s point is to
ask, to what will we appeal as evidence for the existence of a God who could
guarantee us the validity of our perceptions?
To put this in its modern form, to what can we appeal to, from our
experience, as evidence that we are not in the matrix? To appeal to the content of those perceptions
(what we see, hear, feel and experience) to establish the existence of a God
who ensures the validity of those same perceptions is begging the question, as
Hume realizes. To put this another way,
it would be constructing an argument where one of the premises is the
conclusion of that same argument. This
is circular reasoning, or as I said, begging the question.

[1] The
presentation of Hume’s argument that follows specifically avoids overly
technical jargon and therefore oversimplifies many of Hume and Kant’s arguments
in favor of a cohesive presentation of the history of modern philosophy that
could be understood by an educated but uninitiated person of average intelligence
as was noted in the introduction. I only
add this footnote for someone who might criticize this article as being overly
simplistic. This article is, again, more
about the history of philosophy rather than an exercise in philosophy.

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Hume also addresses the idea of
secondary and primary qualities of an object.[1] He argues that since philosophers already
accept that secondary qualities of an object are abstract and imposed on it by
the mind, that it is a logical consequence primary qualities, such as extension
and duration, are imposed upon that object as well. The point here is subtle, but it goes back to
the idea that since we cannot conceive of an object of substance or duration without these secondary qualities, such
as temperature, weight, color, etc., and
sense these primary qualities again arrive to us through our senses, same as
these secondary qualities, then we have much right to doubt they are “real” or
“out there” as we already do about more supposedly arbitrary properties like
hot and cold. The ramifications for Hume,
the skeptic, are that this means our minds are capable of perceiving the
experiences of time and duration without any “real world” correlation to these
things at all. Hume put this eloquently
when he said, “the ideas of primary qualities are attained by abstraction.”[2]

Another
attempt to reconcile the mind-body “gap” that Hume debunks is the claim that “perceptions
of the external world” are the same as the “external world.” This claim is saying, in essence, there is no
gap at all, but that we really, by the means of the senses, have our minds truly
come into actual contact with the external world. Hume responds by saying that no one “can ever
find a convincing argument from experience to prove that the perceptions are
really connected with external objects.”[3] In essence, Hume is saying that, unless we
are outside of the matrix to check, there is no way of learning anything about
how our mind interacts with the matrix/world because we can only see it from the
inside, and from within your own mind, you cannot verify your senses are
working properly because you only have them to compare to.

With
an understanding of all of these issues from Descartes, and more specifically,
how Hume responded to them, the stage is set to understand what has so often
been called Kant’s Copernican Revolution.
All philosophy is a discourse, or dialogue, and, as Hume wrote in
response to Berkley and others, Kant wrote in response to Hume. Rather than, as Hume did, review all that was
before him and attempt to illustrate how it was pointless and that from the
very beginning the whole discussion made a few moves that have necessitated the
sane appearance of the skeptical position taken by Hume, Kant agreed with
Hume’s assessment of the situation.
Proof, of the kind Descartes and those that directly followed him
sought, Kant agreed, was impossible to find.
However, Kant does not give up on philosophy; instead, he asks a new
question, one that has not been asked before, and it is in the asking of this
question that the shift known as Kant’s Copernican Revolution begins.

[1] Here
Hume is responding to a different branch of the discourse of modern philosophy
as it pertains to metaphysics. The
concept of primary and secondary qualities is a distinguishing between things
like hot and cold which are easily proven arbitrary (think of how a 95 degree
glass feels after your hand has been in ice versus how it feels after it has
been in very hot water) are different from real, or primary, qualities of
extension: time and space. These, it was
argued before Hume, are manifestations of the “real world.”

The new question that Kant asks is
this: what necessary conditions must
hold for what we commonly accept as human knowledge to be possible? To clarify, he is no longer asking the old question,
that is, how can we be certain that we have any knowledge and are not deceived
about everything (the matrix question).
The question he, instead, asks comes from two things. The first of these is Descartes’ Cogito,
something no philosopher has disputed: that we are creatures with mental states
which are experiences. The second
influence on Kant in the formation of this question is what can be described as
the common sense view of knowledge. That
is, we commonly claim to have knowledge about ourselves and “the external
world”; it is only in the context of philosophical discussion this knowledge is
ever doubted. This is to say that if
Hume is right, the validity of our common sense knowledge might simply be a task
incapable of accomplishment by our mental facility.

This
brings into notion, in a new way, the idea of a limit to our mental
capacity. Kant says, let us not ask
futile questions, but, instead, explore this limit of what we all commonly
accept as the manner in which our understanding, if at all possible, takes
place. Within this new investigation may
lie a clue to unraveling the problems Descartes’ quest for certainty knotted
for modern philosophy. Kant begins his
discussion by examining all experiences as necessarily having the qualities of time
and space. These two things he calls intuitions. These intuitions are the manner in which we
interact with objects we “experience.” This
is as simple as it seems, but remember, in philosophy, it is these seemingly
simple steps at the beginning of the thought process that are so
important. Throughout this article, terms
like “real world” and “external world” have often been put in quotes to mark
them for the purposes of a distinction at the heart of Kant’s Copernican
Revolution, which is now important.

Other Philosophical Works of Note

Philosophy, and
common man for that matter, has a common notion of an “external world” that
extends in time and space and exists independently from us, the subject
experiencing it. Kant, on the other
hand, says all we really know is that we have no capacity for experience
outside of the intuitions, as he
stipulated them, of time and space. In
other words, time and space are the form our way of “experiencing” reality
takes place in. They are the vase into
which anything we “experience” must fit before we can recognize it as
experience. The revolutionary implication
is that maybe time and space are
properties of our human method of understanding, that maybe they are something
we are, without realizing it, bringing to what we see as “the external world.” This is indeed one of the major ideas in
Kant’s Copernican Revolution: that there is no outside world subject to time
and space the way we imagine it, but rather, we create time and space by the
method of our experiencing an “external world” that does not contain those
properties as we have always assumed it has.

For
Kant, “the external world” had none of the primary or secondary qualities Hume
denied it. Kant saw all these qualities
as signs, rather, of our human way of experiencing things external to our minds. What is left for the “external world,” then, is
an unknowable reality that not only exists “outside” of us, but also, for Kant,
exists “outside” our capacity to even experience it (again, this is a way of
describing someone inside the matrix’s relationship with the world outside of
the matrix). This existence Kant calls “noumenal
reality.” It can only be understood, to humans, as that which we can never
experience, for the second we interact with noumenal reality, we impose time,
space, as well as several other categories Kant discusses, onto it. The result of this experience Kant called “phenomenal
reality.” As strange as it seems, this
is where the word “phenomenal” comes from.
.

There
are some ramifications Kant’s revolutionary way of looking at time and space,
namely that it implies what goes on when we experience or understand is the
impression of certain ideas or categories,
by our mental processes and senses upon a neutral reality that does not
necessarily possess them that results in the thing we understand as experience. This is an activity. That is to say, we, those who experience
noumenal reality as phenomenal reality, are mentally organizing and arranging
those things which we experience into two intuitions and twelve categories.[1] This would mean that thought, then, is an act, not a substance. Understanding what
is meant with this will show us how Kant resolved what all since Descartes has
failed at doing: bridging the gap.[2]

[1] These
categories will not be discussed here, but are stipulated by Kant as things
such as cause and effect, contingency, necessity, inference, negation,
limitation, unity, etc. They require
immense proofs to attest that they are a priori, that is innate in our system
of understanding prior to experience, the walls of our understanding, and what
it looks like inside our mind. Just
understand that this means: if time and space are imposed upon reality by the
human mind, cause and effect is are as well.
This doesn’t mean that these things don’t have meaning, but that we have,
since Descartes, gone about understanding their meaning in the wrong way.

[2] Many
have argued that Kant has failed in many ways, but, as a student of the history
of Philosophy, the questions we asked changed with Kant and the issues evolved
so that his thoughts are, truly revolutionary, despite things that have been
since been considered inaccurate.

Works on Cartesian Dualism

To understand how this
is even possible, we need to proceed carefully.
If Kant is right and there is noumenal reality that our mental process
forces time and space onto so that it can experience it, and then it organizes and
understands this experience by subjective and inherent cognitive methods such
as cause and effect, the basic being of our mental states, or thoughts, is the
action of categorizing, associating, and interpreting. Kant would refer to this subjectivity as a
complex method of mental action that operates upon a substance of noumenal
reality to create a substance of phenomenal reality: reality after it has been
processed so we can experience it. Kant
saw this phenomenal reality as the marriage of the “pure activity” (without an
object of these actions, just the acts themselves) of subjectivity, which he
called the transcendental subject, and noumenal reality, both of which are
beyond our human understanding for we cannot conceive of activity without
something being acted upon or someone doing the acting, just as we cannot
conceive of an external reality that is not subject to time and space.

Thus
the problem of bridging the gap between two types of substances no longer
exists because Kant has redefined the mind, not as a substance called thought,
but as acts called experiencing and understanding. Since Kant,
philosophy has not been the same, and the new discourse begins with these moves
towards epistemology that Kant made much in the way that the discourse before
him centered on the issues resulting from Descartes’ investigations. The ramifications of Kant’s philosophy are
widespread. The manifestation of the
concepts of subjectivity in psycho-analysis and post-structuralism in the
twentieth century are just a couple of examples that show Kant to be far ahead
of his time; for only in the last fifty years have these theories come to the
forefront of critical discourse.[1]

[1] Though there
are numerous examples. Michael Foucault
and Julia Kristeva specifically come to mind.

Kant's influential work. | Source

Beyond even this, if we have
learned that there were small moves Descartes made with unforeseen ramifications,
we should be aware the same can most likely be said of Kant’s Copernican
Revolution, for the concepts of relativism stem from an understanding of the
world as a personal experience with an unknowable ultimate reality. It would be foolish to not recognize the
consequences of an unexperiencible, noumenal reality as disillusioning and/or
liberating depending on how one might react to it; therefore we should expect
to find both reactions. In fact, both reactions
can be found in post-modernism disdain and revelry at the fact if there is any
ultimate reality none of us are going to figure it out. Anyone of a half a dozen authors, from Joseph
Heller to Thomas Pynchon, to Don DeLilo are examples of this. As time goes on, the ramifications of this
and other aspects of Kant’s Copernican Revolution will continue to manifest
themselves in mainstream culture just as Descartes’ have before them.

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8 comments

Awesome essay. I remember the class on which I first read Kant... I believe 80% of the class dropped that class because Kant, while interesting, was not exactly an easy read, at that level anyway. Now, Descartes, I have always had a fondness for, as he was the one who lured me into philosophy.

cdub77 5 years ago from Portland Or Author

Thanks for the encouraging comments everyone!

@nmalbert, Descartes was also the one who lured me into philosophy, at least "modern philosophy". I think Kant is challenging at any level (especially for me!), but I've spent enough time with these works that I felt brave enough to offer this article to the world!

@satomko Thanks! I have a few more articles on Philosophy in the works, but 20th century philosophy is hard to write on! I am working on it.

slp 5 years ago

very thoughtful handling of subject. Thanks

jackie_fish 5 years ago

really enjoyed reading this it help me in my own understanding at collage thanks :D